I'm learning the relative pronoun ὅς, and the feminine accusative plural requires an alpha with a macron, rough breathing mark, and acute accent. I cannot figure out a way to combine all three diacritics either with my custom shortcuts or with Manuel Lopez's Classical Greek keyboard. My best attempts seem to either push the macron off-center or merge the macron with one of the other two marks to create some weird hybrid: ἅ̄ς ᾱ̔́ς

Gregorius wrote:I'm learning the relative pronoun ὅς, and the feminine accusative plural requires an alpha with a macron, rough breathing mark, and acute accent. I cannot figure out a way to combine all three diacritics either with my custom shortcuts or with Manuel Lopez's Classical Greek keyboard. My best attempts seem to either push the macron off-center or merge the macron with one of the other two marks to create some weird hybrid: ἅ̄ς ᾱ̔́ς

Any advice will be most appreciated!

Advice? Good luck. The fonts don't normally support macron/chevron insertion for Polytonic Greek in Unicode. It might appear in the future, but right now there's no consistent way to do it (outside of setting up specific commands in LaTeX to output it, which isn't very useful for day-to-day exchanges and cannot be copy-pasted into another application).

I know New Athena Unicode is a free font which has pre-made symbols with both macron and accents& breathing marks, though there is no other free font with such symbols, as far as I know, and there'sno key combination to insert them other than the usual hex value alt+[x], where x is a 4 digit numberor a combo of numbers and letters located at the bottom of the symbol window assigned to each symbolas you click it. Of course, you could change its shortcut to something easier to remember at any time.You should keep in mind, however, that this font looks awful.

If only we had the complete version of GFS porson used in Smyth and other grammar books.

NateD26 wrote:If only we had the complete version of GFS porson used in Smyth and other grammar books.

My dear Nate... I couldn't agree more. When will they release such a wonderful free tool?!?!?!

Maybe they do this so that not every Tom, D*i*c*k and Harry could release a grammar or try to self-publish on a professional level? Only those who can manipulate and suffer LaTeX will be able to do such things.

Rats! I'm not alone in this, huh? Well, I've arrived at two makeshift solutions. Neither one is perfect, but I suppose they'll have to do until TPTB democratize the full polytonic typeface.

#1: Use NAU for these triple-diacritic characters while using normal font for everything else. (ᾱ̔́ς)#2: Invent an unorthodox use for the chevron, namely to indicate any long, roughly breathed vowel with either an acute or grave accent (since the grave is only ever used at the ends of words, the intended accent can be inferred from the placement of the vowel). It's certainly not ideal for official purposes, but it works fine for personal use. (ᾰς)

Come to think of it, I think this may be the only instance of more than two diacritics on the same letter (assuming you leave short alpha/iota and smooth breathing unmarked). That may be why it's so difficult to type, since keyboard/font designers may have thought triple-diacritics to be so rare as to be hardly worth accommodating. Also, even with just two, things often start to look a bit cluttered.

Last edited by Gregorius on Fri Mar 25, 2011 5:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I would upload a file containing my cheatsheet for the Greek Polytonic Keyboard in Windows plus the New Athena Unicode special characters such as alpha+macron+rough+acute, but for some reason, Textkit won't currently allow it. If you private message me with an email address, I would be glad to send it to you.

I, Lex Llama, super genius, will one day rule this planet! And then you'll rue the day you messed with me, you damned dirty apes!